Chương 95: Chapter 85 - A New Enemy

++Keeping my brother alive in Estalia was the least of my efforts, by far the greater part was eaten up by keeping him credited for all the amazing feats that occured. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Nesariyah was aware Garamon's people did not like Estalia's.

She'd observed this fact through a few subtle clues, ranging from the sidelong looks she received when accompanying Vornholt on errands to the semi-regular mass rapes that occured in the regions of the city deemed to be rebel hotspots. It was not until now, however, that she had been forced to interact with the system of Garamon's Orapathaqi occupation force in any significant way. Before, Vornholt had filtered everything with her very presence.

People did not keep the girl waiting, regardless of how they felt about her. At fifteen, she seemed to inspire more fear than would most grown men if they were aiming a scattergun at the face of whoever they spoke to. But Nesariyah was not Isabel Vornholt. Older though she may have been, she lacked the girl's inhuman talent. She lacked her vacant, killer's conviction, and most important of all… she lacked her pale skin and Garamon accent.

The invaders did not see anything to be impressed with in Nesariyah, and minus Vornholt's direct presence they saw no reason to heed what she said just because she claimed to be saying it on Vornholt's behalf. Far from inheriting the fear her mistress seemed to inspire, Nesariyah appeared to be reaping all the hidden contempt that people were too scared to let show openly when the girl herself was present.

And so, despite stressing how important her business was when requesting a meeting with Agrian Vornholt's casting squad leader, Nesariyah was still waiting to actually see him almost an hour later. She'd tried emphasizing the urgency, repeating, several times, that rebel activity was at large, and yet nothing seemed to work. It would have been unbelievable, if recent events had left her with the capacity for unbelief.

Forget ruining her city and killing her people, the idiots of Garamon seemed so mindlessly hateful and stupid that they would even ignore an active threat to their presence rather than do a single, sensible thing. Maybe if Vornholt had allowed her to share the truth of her brother's capture, people would have listened to Nesariyah. As things were, she spent her waiting period rapidly oscillating between simmering rage and mounting despair. And none of it, it seemed, brought her any closer to that fucking meeting.

Agrian's arms hurt. They'd been bound right behind him, in a way that was decidedly uncomfortable and left him essentially no room to shift and move them less agonizingly. In fact, they'd been bound in such a way as to ensure that every attempt to shift them, no matter how small and limited, only brought new rolls of pain to wash down his joints, through his muscles, into his bones. Like someone was punching him right in the ligament.

His body lay down on hard stone, angled in such a way as to keep his face pressed against it. If he tried to lift his cheek away from the surface, suddenly his whole weight seemed to be bearing down on his neck and the pain there became all the worse. If he did nothing then his facial bones took the strain, which wasn't much better. It meant constant effort from him to find the least-agonizing position possible and stick to it.

Agrian suspected this was intentional; he'd killed several of his captors before being snatched, after all, and the rebels never liked Garamon's battlemages at the best of times. That begged another question. Why the fuck was Agrian still alive? He'd have liked to look around and try to answer that as best he could, but the effort of doing so was almost as big a barrier as the physical threat of being subdued should he leave. That didn't stop him, but it certainly made things slow and painful.

Agrian squirmed like a worm on the fisherman's hook and felt his body protest with every movement. So nice of my darling sister to give Qaigor that special warrior's treatment, he thought. Would've been even nicer to share some myself. Apparently Isabel hadn't figured out how to give it to a magician yet, so Agrian was still stuck as the physically weakest man of the Vornholt house. He managed, slowly. Will was the weapon of any magician, right?

Well it'd have to be the weapon of this one, at least, because he had fuck-all else. Agrian didn't dare call on his mana, he could feel the presence of other, powerful magicians and had a strong inkling they'd be on him like stink on a shit the moment he started drawing out any power at all. So it was all bodily control and stubbornness that finally saw his eyes repositioned in a way that gave them something of an actual view at the room around him.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. His guts might have fallen out through his asshole, if the ropes binding him weren't keeping everything tightly compressed. Sandstone pillars and marble walls, hard floors. No windows that Agrian could see; maybe they were boarded up, maybe they were just more solid stone. Aether was bolted onto all of it in thick panels.

Thick enough that if it was even half as strong as the stuff he could make, this building would've done pretty well against an artillery barrage. It was occupied by more than just him, maybe a score of people moving around doing one thing or another. Not rebels, more of the dark-robed magicians from the ruins. None were looking at Agrian with much intensity, but he got enough glances from all sides to know that he'd been right in assuming magic usage would not go unnoticed on his part.

He gave it a go anyway, rapid and sudden and bursting forth when, ridiculously, he saw a chance with all eyes off him at once. That moment's opportunity was one of the most glorious, terrifying things he'd ever experienced. And it was over in an instant as Agrian felt the mana blocked where it tried to make its way over and answer his call. That was when he took notice of the sigils carved into the stone beneath him.

Stories tended to hold that magical symbols glowed and hummed with their power, but that was not always true. Magic that made light and noise was generally magic that was wasting energy. These sigils barely made a whisper, and even in the dim lighting Agrian could hardly make out their glow. Whoever had made them was very skilled indeed. And they'd made them to restrain Agrian's own mana. Panic ran its way through him with a more primal force than he'd ever felt before.

Agrian was shivering, doing all he could not to fucking whimper while he was at it. This was… new. No. Not new, it was old. An old, terrible fear so long in Agrian's past that it had never really not been a part of him. A fear as fundamental to who he was now as just about anything else. He thought back to his kidnapping and the feeling of magic refusing to obey him, and now he felt it all over again. The tears came unbidden, too much for him to suppress. Stop it. You fucking weasel, what would Isabel do?

There were probably more emasculating thoughts than thinking of how to emulate one's little sister while being held hostage, but for the life of him Agrian couldn't picture any just in that moment. But that didn't mean he was about to sit around trying, he had better things to do. Isabel, Agrian knew, would be focused on escape rather than feeling sorry for herself. How did you get out of ropes again? Right, flex out and take up as much space as you could while being tied up to give yourself some slack.

Agrian had been half-unconscious while being tied up, he'd not had the chance to do this. Bollocks. Was there a second technique? No, not that he could remember. They all pretty much assumed you'd not fucked up the first thing. So his bonds were looking like they'd stay. Was he just fucked? Location. Agrian needed to know where he was, first. He'd— The girl scared the bloody skeleton out of him as she plopped herself down in front of him without warning.

"Uh, hello?" Agrian began, not sure what else to say.

"Who are—" the girl interrupted him by leaning forward and sniffing him. Agrian was not, as a rule, afraid of people half his size, and this girl barely qualified for that. She was maybe Isabel's age, though a bit shorter and wiry. Her hair was just as dark and her skin a native Estalian bronze, with eyes as blue as sapphires. All of this left quite a striking appearance of course, but was quite insignificant compared to the more notable fact of her having just sniffed him.

"What the fuck!?" he yelled, squirming to try and recoil but unable to really move much. She leaned back and eyed him.

"Are you insane?!" Agrian demanded, angrier than he was scared now. Fear had a way of doing that to him, particularly fear of something as embarrassing as a young girl. She just laughed in the face of his rage.

"My name is Sethira," she spoke in as thick an Orapathaqi accent as Agrian had ever heard, seeming to drag out all the vowels and strike sparks from every consonant.

"This is my abode, and these…" she gestured out, Agrian realised at the robed magicians.

"... Are my people." It took him a moment to let that sink in. When it did, feigned amusement was his first response.

"Bit young to be in charge of all those grown men, aren't you?" In truth, growing up with Isabel, Agrian knew better than to underestimate a person over something silly like them being a teenaged girl. But he saw no reason to make his enemies privy to how cautious he felt.

"If you disrespect me like that I will make you spasm in indescribable agony," the girl told him. Only the fractional narrowing of her eyes conveyed any emotion at all, but somehow Agrian was certain she'd be as good as her word on this. He had other questions, and though they were all stifled by his fear for the moment they were still working themselves free. But then one of the cultists spoke up and interrupted everything.

"High Priestess, the ritual is nearing completion," he told the girl. Sethira, she'd said her name was.

"We can use the prodigy whenever you wish." Agrian noticed the man spoke with no small touch of fear, and one look at the reptilian irritation on his apparent leader's face made it clear why. The girl called Sethira climbed to her feet with a curled lip and hollow eyes.

"The prodigy isn't here, you imbecile," Sethira snapped.

"She is still making her way over to us." She could've set Agrian's hair on fire and it wouldn't have caused as intense a panic as that. A gag came down over his mouth from behind, silencing him before he could say anything more, and the desperation only grew in his muting. Isabel, they were after Isabel. And stupid, useless fucking Agrian Vornholt was the bait to drag her right into their trap.